Finished reading: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. I’m not yet ready to do a review — that will have to wait for a second reading — but I will say that the people who see this as the third in a detective trilogy, following Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), are mostly wrong. The essential point of this book is to trace a line that links the multiple timelines of Against the Day (2006) to the next-door-to-ours hippiecentric moral universe of Vineland (1990) — a connection made pretty explicit when in the final chapter we see a U-boat (“an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time”) that travels through an alternate dimension in just the way that the Chums of Chance travel in Against, and then read a letter from Skeet Wheeler, on his way to California, quite obviously the father of Vineland’s Zoyd Wheeler. This alternate history of our world runs from the Chicago World’s Fair to the Tunguska Event to Prohibition to the rise of European fascism and ultimately to Reagan’s America. But passage from one terminus to the other takes us through what the narrator of Mason & Dixon (1997) calls “Worlds alternative to this one” — which is why you need a shadow ticket. 📚